Stephan James in conversation with Samantha Asumadu

Sam interviews actor Stephan James on Barry Jenkins' radical empathy, James Baldwin, black love stories and British slang! Sam and Ava will be back in a new studio and with fantastic new guests in April! IF BEALE STREET COULD is out in UK cinemas on 8th Feb 'Like James Baldwin’s Best Work, If Beale Street Could Talk Contains Multitudes Barry Jenkins’s follow-up to Moonlight, starring KiKi Layne and Stephan James as a pair of lovers torn asunder, is a triumph.' 'Barry Jenkins makes movies about black love. His 2008 debut, Medicine for Melancholy, chronicled a one-night stand turned burgeoning romance in a maddeningly gentrifying San Francisco. Moonlight, his wonderful follow-up and 2016 best-picture winner, is a coming-of-age story about a fatherless queer boy set among the impoverished Miami neighborhoods that were once home to Jenkins himself. Its endgame isn’t sex, or even necessarily sexuality, but something even more rare in movies: pure, loving intimacy between black men, sexual and not. Now comes If Beale Street Could Talk, Jenkins’s extraordinary adaptation of James Baldwin’s soulful 1974 novel. It’s a lush, courageous black melodrama set in 1970s New York, a story about love defying injustice—or trying its damndest to. Tish (newcomer KiKi Layne), 19, and Fonny (Stephan James), 22, were once childhood playmates—chubby, laughing babes taking baths together, being raised alongside one another, despite yawning differences between their families’ social and religious beliefs. Fonny’s mother is extremely devout, as are his sisters. Tish and her sister, Ernestine (Teyonah Parris), are more modern: well-raised, hard-working women who nevertheless curse in front of their parents.'